Lourens Adriaanse, Bongi Mbonambi and Adriaan Strauss of South Africa leave the field after their defeat to England.
Photograph: Laurence Griffiths/Getty Images

Aspects of Top 14 comparable to T20 effect on Test cricket?

Brighton is an unlikely setting for a rugby revolution, but Japan’s 34-32 victory against South Africa there in the World Cup last year showed how the old order was changing. There had been shocks before, not least Western Samoa beating Wales in Cardiff in 1991, but the toppling of the Springboks, twice winners of the tournament and who had never before lost to a tier two nation, brought a giant crashing to the ground.

South Africa went on to reach the semi-finals where they lost to New Zealand by two points while Japan became the most successful team in the tournament’s history not to make the last eight, losing only one pool game, to Scotland four days after their Brighton ball. The two countries are this month on tour in Europe, the Springboks in Italy this weekend after being outwitted by England at Twickenham while Japan are in Cardiff having achieved a notable victory in Georgia last weekend in an unofficial tier two title bout.

Japan’s squad includes just eight of the 23 who were involved in the victory over South Africa and none of the points scorers. Seven of the 23 who appeared for the Springboks in Brighton were involved at Twickenham, including Pieter-Steph du Toit, the second row who, as against England, was fielded out of position at wing forward with an equally conspicuous lack of success, an obsession with size generating sighs.

Toulon played Stade Français on Sunday night. Their team included three Springbok forwards, including Duane Vermeulen whose availability for South Africa against England would have spared Du Toit an embarrassing afternoon, as well as Ayumu Goromaru, the Japan full-back who scored 24 points in the World Cup match at Brighton. They also had three Wallabies and a World Cup winner, Ma’a Nonu, while Juan Smith and Matt Giteau were missing through injury.

Talks over the global calendar are all very well, but the primacy of international rugby is being undermined by clubs, mainly in the Top 14, who are taking advantage of the instability of the game in South Africa, and weakness of the rand, along with the financial constraints under which the Australian Rugby Union is labouring.

The Rugby Football Union chief executive, Ian Ritchie, struggles to understand why the major southern hemisphere nations want a rethink over how the receipts from Test match rugby are divided: a glance at the Top 14 line-ups this weekend at last should switch on the light. Count the money, then count the cost.

Montpellier had two forwards named Du Plessis in their pack against Lyon on Saturday – a third was injured. Alongside them were a Van Rensburg, a Liebenberg and Pierre Spies, a mixture of seasoned international players and players not long graduated from South Africa’s Under-20 squad. Frans Steyn was in the centre, along with the 26-year-old Wallaby Joe Tomane who is the same age as his scrum-half compatriot Nic White, and a year younger than the replacement Jesse Mogg.

As long as players, and not those like Nonu perhaps hoping to build a pension after a decade or more playing at the highest level, can earn more by playing club rather than international rugby in the prime of their careers, the Test game will be weakened, just as T20 leagues are undermining Test cricket by offering players handsome salaries: they get paid more for playing less.

The French Rugby Federation was too slow to react to wealthy club owners in the Top 14 buying up players from around the world and diluting the number of France-qualified players in the tournament. Some clubs devised academy programmes aimed at exploiting the three-year residential qualification period for non-nationals, something the World Rugby vice-chairman, Agustín Pichot, is trying to undermine by raising it to at least five years.

Coupled with that is a desire to give players from tier two nations the incentive to remain at home, such as Fiji, who asked the Rugby Football Union for £150,000 from the proceeds of the match. They received half that amount with Ritchie rightly saying it was not the RFU’s responsibility to fund other countries, but sport is not like other businesses because rivals going under weakens it.

Why is Goromaru playing for a club in France, covering for the Wales full-back Leigh Halfpenny, rather than touring with his country, the hosts of the next World Cup? He was one of a number of players to make themselves unavailable for the Brave Blossoms’ tour: some, like the World Cup captain Michael Leitch, pleaded fatigue after a Super Rugby season with the Sunwolves, but the head coach, Jamie Joseph, who took over from Eddie Jones this year, is having to blood players earlier than he intended.

While Japan want to push on, South Africa are having to cling on. They are also under new management having chosen not to renew Heyneke Meyer’s contract after the World Cup. A third-place finish looks, 13 months on, respectable with the Springboks in danger of falling out of the top four of the world rankings. The poverty of their performance against England was tough to digest given the closeness of many of their rubbers with New Zealand over the years. It was also sad.

Rugby union’s rewards have never been higher but risks have never been greater

Read more

International rugby is too small to lose a country of South Africa’s stature and history. Yes, form can be cyclical and the Springboks looked in a state of collapse before and during the 2003 World Cup, but their decline is becoming precipitate. The number of players leaving for overseas has undermined their Super Rugby and provincial teams; they resemble Wales in the pre-regional era when they did not have enough players to make their clubs competitive in cross-border tournaments.

Jones could be forgiven for wondering, in what passes for his spare time, how his future would have played out had he remained with the Stormers last year. It is hard to think that he would not have been approached by the South African union to help out: what happened at Twickenham was partly a failure of coaching. The Springboks looked under-prepared, devoid of ideas, never mind inspiration. Without a strong core, things quickly fall apart.

Perhaps, in time, tier two countries will break through and become a force in the game, as France did in the 1950s, but if South Africa continue to slide and Australia’s financial woes lead to an even greater exodus of players, international rugby will suffer and unions in Europe will count the cost. The primacy of international rugby should mean exactly that: 15,000 at Toulon, more than five times that at Twickenham.